The 6th Boston Python Workshop

The 6th Boston Python Workshop ran the weekend of March 30th at MIT. It marked a full year of diversity outreach with the Boston Python user group and was the second workshop to utilize our grant from the Python Software Foundation Outreach and Education Committee.

Boston Python Workshop 6, Friday night

Additional resources:

PyCon 2012 poster: getting and retaining new contributors to open source projects

My poster at the PyCon 2012 poster session was on getting and retaining contributors to open source projects.

A short video of me summarizing the poster is at http://pyvideo.org/video/692/2-twisted-matrix-high-scores.

The full-sized 4′x6′ poster pdf is here.

The poster strives to start a dialog in 3 areas of open source community management:

  1. Providing a welcoming environment with clear contribution guidelines and opportunities for new contributors.
  2. Identifying where in the ticket lifecycle a project bottlenecks and loses potential contributors, and how to incentivize community members to work on those bottlenecks.
  3. Resources for beginning open source contributors.

I use the Twisted Matrix High scores list as an example of one strategy to incentivize community members to work on ticket bottlenecks.

I happily got a lot of traffic in the poster hall, with a lot of people sharing their community stories and checking out OpenHatch and Twisted as a result (one Twisted sprinter even said he came to our sprint because of the poster!)

I was was right next to Brian Curtin, who had posters on the PSF Sprints and Outreach and Education committees. He funneled people to me to talk about the Boston Python Workshop grant.

For more on the poster session, see the call for posterslist of posters, and the full PyCon 2012 video list.